Noted

▪ CIA Chief Mike Pompeo spends three hours of every weekday driving from the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., to the White House and back, to personally give President Trump his security briefing. Trump doesn’t trust lower-level intelligence officials to do the briefing, his aides say, because he views them as hostile members of “the deep state” and possible sources of leaks.

▪ The U.S. is as divided in its technological progress as in its politics. About 39 percent of the U.S. rural population, 23 million people, lack access to broadband internet service, compared with 4 percent of urban residents. Without broadband, rural residents have slow, unreliable service.

The Wall Street Journal

▪ Wildfires were once rare in the grasslands of the Great Plains, but their numbers more than tripled between 1985 and 2014—from about 33 a year to 117. Experts have attributed the rise to both climate change and an incursion of invasive plant species that have provided additional fuel.

The Washington Post

▪ Since 2005, 80 officers have been arrested for fatal on-duty shootings, and just 28 convicted. There are about 1,000 police shootings of civilians every year in the U.S.